MPs lose marbles

Our parliamentarians have learnt the lesson of Goebbels well. If you’re going to fib, tell the biggest lie possible.

Take the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LEP, that august body which appears to contain just two Cornish people on its eleven-member Board. The LEP is a thinly disguised front organisation for Cornwall Council, as can be seen in its endorsement of an Enterprise Zone to prop up the Council’s exercise in hubristic futility at Newquay Airport. Now, as Illogan Blogger alerts us, the LEP has £4.2 million to play with from the Government’s Growing Places Fund.

This money stems from a belated recognition by the Government that the economy has to be stimulated by some Keynesian style spending in order to offset the effects of its austerity for the poor project. A fairly paltry £500 million is being pumped into infrastructure via this fund.

Now, boosting economic activity and creating jobs could conceivably involve spending money on all sorts of things – harbours, community centres, renewable energy projects, sports stadia even. But this doesn’t. It focuses on addressing ‘infrastructure constraints’ and promoting the ‘delivery of jobs and houses’.

In other words it’s a subsidy for housebuilders who won’t have to cough up so much money in sweeteners (known as Section 106 agreements) in order to bribe local planners. This deeply undemocratic and corrupt device for financing infrastructure, rather than taxing developers’ profits and allowing local authorities to decide how to spend the tax receipts, is itself a scandal. But of course typical of that crony corporate house-building which is driving us towards a deeply unattractive future.

Step up Sarah Newton, MP for Truro-Falmouth. Cosy house-building stitch-ups between council and developers are not the issue for Sarah. The million plus who’ll be living in our land by 2100 is an inconsequential detail not worth the mention.

No, Sarah welcomed the £4.2 million. It

will unlock much-needed local infrastructure and get the homes we need built.

We? Who’s this ‘we’ then? Does Sarah not realise that at least three quarters of the extra housing will go to in-migrants?

Even more bizarrely, she goes on to claim that pushing up the population in this way will

improve the lives of local residents in Truro and Falmouth and … reduce congestion

Dear of her. Sarah Newton

We have truly arrived only a quarter of century late at that 1984 dystopia where white is black and black is white. This is a never-never land where more houses and roads miraculously result in fewer of us morons driving along to the supermarket. The same dreamworld where calling a new housing development an ‘eco-community’ will mean none of its residents will drive a car or rely on a 9-5 job, that world where park and rides do not create extra traffic, or where green fields are in fact brown fields.

This is that never-never land where the implications of doubling the population of Cornwall must never ever be addressed, let alone debated. It’s a land in which all corporate politicians live, together with most councillors and the whole of a planning fraternity whose role is to soothe the masses while guaranteeing the right of developers to maximise profits.

Another denizen of this Alice in Wonderland is Lib Dem Cabinet Minister Danny Alexander. Parroting Sarah, or was it Sarah parroting Danny? He also thinks the Growing Places Fund will

improve the lives of local residents

and

reduce congestion

Must be so then.